Old Baoshan in the rain

By:  July 19, 2023 Categories: 

(New photos from 2025 beneath.)

We visited the Old Baoshan (老宝山) in the north of Pudong, after a tip of Historic Pudong.

Baoshan is also a district on the other side of the river. It has the same Chinese characters, but there’s no proof that the names are related to each other. (It’s not too weird for an area to have two ‘Precious Mountains’, right?)

The area was closed but the gates weren’t locked. When I entered, I saw two guys who probably live here in their underwear (~36°C outside), but then it started to pour and I didn’t see them again. Here used to stand a full city wall encircling a town, but right now only two pieces of the wall remain and a tunnel in between, and a ridge of grass to mark the rest of the old wall.

The plaque is hard to read in the rain, Historic Pudong found a better one.

It’s already protected by heritage law, and they’ll probably turn this into a proper tourist location later.

For now, it’s an odd little trace left from a city built centuries ago, in between trucks & cargo containers.

New photos from October 2025

Latest

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026
Cake and Timepieces

Cake and Timepieces

There are multiple ways to define Shanghai. There’s the more modern version, with beautiful lanes full of expensive yoga studios or artisan coffee shops, lined with the London Plane Tree (法国梧桐) and the Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), and renovated parks like the North Bund (北外滩) and West Bund (西岸). There’s also the Shanghai as the international […]
June 23, 2026
A candle in Minnesota

A candle in Minnesota

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m in Saint Paul, Minnesota, attending the morning mass at St. Bernard’s church. It’s about twenty years since I last attended a mass, and the first time I’ve ever done so voluntarily. I’m sure I’m drawn to this church near my Airbnb, compelled to go in, but I find it hard […]
June 14, 2026
Revisiting Columbine

Revisiting Columbine

Growing up in the Netherlands, it’s not immediately obvious (even to myself) that the history of the United States is also partly mine, but through TV series and movies — as well as the news — it’s also a country I lived in and grew up in. And unlike presidential elections or the September 11th […]
June 8, 2026